The development of distributed, computer networks, such as the Internet, allows users to retrieve vast amounts of electronic information previously unavailable. The Internet increasingly is displacing more conventional means of information transmission, such as newspapers, magazines, and even television.
Electronic information transferred between computer networks (e.g., the Internet) can be is presented to a user in hypertext, a metaphor for presenting information in a manner in which text, images, sounds, and actions become linked together in a complex, non-sequential web of associations that permit the user to "browse" through related topics, regardless of the presented order of the topics. For example, traveling among links to the word "iron" in an article might lead the user to the periodic table of the chemical elements, or to a reference to the use of iron in weapons in Europe in the Dark Ages. The term "hypertext" is used to describe documents, as presented by a computer, that express the nonlinear structure of ideas, as opposed to the linear format of books, film, and speech. The combination of hypertext documents connected by their links in the Internet is referred to as the World Wide Web (WWW).
Networked computers utilizing hypertext conventions typically follow a client/server architecture. A "client" is usually a computer that requests a service provided by another computer (i.e., a server). A "server" is typically a remote computer system accessible over the network. Based upon such requests by the user at the client, the server presents information to the user as responses to the client. The client typically contains a program, called a browser, that communicates the requests to the server and formats the responses for viewing (browsing) at the client. The browser retrieves a web page from the server and displays it to the user at the client.
A "web page" (also referred to as a "page") is a data file, or document, written in a hyper-text language that may have hyperlinks, text, graphic images, and even multimedia objects, such as sound recordings or video clips, associated with that data file. A hyperlink is a link to a web page. The hyperlink is often presented to the user as a button in a web page, which the user may select, which causes the browser to retrieve the linked web-page.
Unfortunately, all of these web pages connected by hyperlinks are unorganized, and there is no table-of-contents. Thus, it can be very difficult for a user to determine the context of a web page, especially when the user has jumped to the web page from a search engine. The web page, its child pages, and its ancestor pages form a hierarchical structure and give context to the web page. Thus, the context of a web page is the relationship of the web page to its child and ancestor pages. Sometimes a web page will contain hyperlinks that point to the child and ancestor pages, but sometimes the page contains no such hyperlinks. It is cumbersome for the user to leave the current web-page in attempt to locate its ancestor pages, especially when the web page contains no hyperlinks that point to the ancestor pages.
Thus, there is a need for a mechanism that provides contextual information for a displayed web-page.